Washington Post via MSN no paywall: “Imagine you are redesigning your living space. You could hire an interior designer for a few thousand dollars. Or you could ask an artificial intelligence tool such as ChatGPT to do it instead. But can AI actually do the work? See what happened in a study that compared how well top AI systems and human workers did at hundreds of real work assignments, including producing a digital version of this hand-drawn floor plan…The failed floor plan illustrates a disconnect three years after the release of ChatGPT that has implications for the whole economy. AI can accomplish many impressive tasks involving computer code, documents or images. That has prompted predictions that human work of many kinds could soon be done by computers alone. Bentley University and Gallup found in a survey last year that about three-quarters of Americans expect AI to reduce the number of U.S. jobs over the next decade. But economic data shows the technology largely has not replaced workers. To understand what work AI can do on its own today, researchers collected hundreds of examples of projects posted on freelancing platforms that humans had been paid to complete. They included tasks such as making 3D product animations, transcribing music, coding web video games and formatting research papers for publication. The research team then gave each task to AI systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. The best-performing AI system successfully completed only 2.5 percent of the projects, according to the research team from Scale AI, a start-up that provides data to AI developers, and the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit that works to understand risks from AI.

Current models are not close to being able to automate real jobs in the economy,” said Jason Hausenloy, one of the researchers on the Remote Labor Index study. They created the index to give policymakers clear-eyed information about the capabilities of AI systems, he said.